I love Dr. Evil [from Austin Powers] as a walking, talking, narcissistic manifestation of everything screwed up about human existence – his desire to take over the world, and have the world reflect his own power lust.
JAY ROACHI love Dr. Evil [from Austin Powers] as a walking, talking, narcissistic manifestation of everything screwed up about human existence – his desire to take over the world, and have the world reflect his own power lust.
JAY ROACHOnce you’re a public figure, there’s a certain amount of privacy you do give up.
JAY ROACHBut I always reassure them that as far as my contractual rights can go, I will protect them and make sure that they have approval over every bit of it so that they know I won’t show something that’s embarrassing.
JAY ROACHSometimes I would like the opportunity to do character-driven comedy and that’s really what I was trying to do in Meet The Parents. I think in a way this is a more old fashioned type of comedy.
JAY ROACHTo his credit John Wayne was open about it, he even portrayed a member of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in a film called ‘Big Jim McClain.’
JAY ROACHIt was an interesting process trying to get Bob to talk about the film because he’s such a shy person. He generally likes to talk when he really knows he has something to say.
JAY ROACHJohn Wayne was never shy about that fervor, but because he was never overly zealous about his politics, and of course his status as a movie, he was embraced by both the right and the left.
JAY ROACHIt’s hard to imagine in this day and age the accent in Dalton Trumbo speaking voice, the Mid Atlantic mixture of an English and American dialect, so flowery and oratorical that it almost sounds theatrical. It would be uncool today, no one would ever speak that way.
JAY ROACHWhen Dalton Trumbo and his friends joined the Communist Party it was 1943, and Russia was our ally in World War II. This was connected to a very popular movement of artists and intellectuals at that time towards anti fascism, and an alliance with the union movement.
JAY ROACHI hope we’re all kind of influencing each other now to keep the quality up on those things. They seem to be getting better and better and better as there’s not only sort of a film geek audience, there’s also a general interest in the overall film consuming population.
JAY ROACHFrom our perspective now, there is a not a huge understanding about the totalitarian Communism that Soviet Russia practiced during the 1950s – it was an atrocious system.
JAY ROACH[Dalton] Trumbo himself was a terrible Communist.
JAY ROACHMini-Me was the pint sized clone that was the perpetuation of Dr. Evil’s own legacy [in Austin Powers]. That concept earned the sequel.
JAY ROACHHedda’s Hopper attitude was ‘once a Commie, always a Commie.’
JAY ROACH[Lyndon Baines ] Johnson is a big and larger-than-life guy, we just tried to give him the dynamic range that he actually had.
JAY ROACHDalton Trumbo was constantly criticizing the membership [in the Communist Party], and was opposite to being a loyalist.
JAY ROACH